Page 15 - HME Business, November/December 2021

Wound Care
according to research from data and ana- lytics firm GlobalData. Also, recent data from market researchers Future Market Insights projects that the North Ameri- can market for negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT), the lion’s share of which is in the United States, will grow to $3.2 billion by 2029, largely due to the growth of single-use disposable devices.
Furthermore, wound care is tied to a wide spectrum of product offerings that includes dressings, lotions, compres- sion wraps and garments, pneumatic compression, negative pressure wound therapy, and therapeutic support servic- es — all items that are ideal elements in a DME pharmacy’s or provider’s product lineup.
AN UNDERSERVED SEGMENT
So why are some DME pharmacies and providers hanging back on wound care? Heather Trumm BSN, RN, CWON, the Director of Wound Care for industry member group VGM & Associates (vgm. com), has some insights on that and some very strong reasons why they need to take a closer look.
For starters, if a DME pharmacy thinks it might not be the right “type” of busi- ness, it’s taking the wrong approach. Trumm says there is no single wound care business model when it comes to DME. Rather, a wound care practice will be re- flective of a pharmacy or DME provider’s marketplace, payer mix, referral partners and patient mix.
“There isn’t an ideal wound care DME dealer out there,” Trumm says. “They all look kind of different ... no two providers are the same out there.
But there is one truism about wound care that is universal for DME pharmacies and providers: it is a largely untapped care and business opportunity. Further- more, the opportunity goes ignored because there are some central mis- understandings about wound care’s com- plexity of product offerings and supplies, profitability, and documentation.
“Wound care is underserved,” Trumm says. “And I believe it’s underserved because — and I hear this from a lot of people — there’s a lot of product SKUs and there’s no money in it. ... What they don’t understand is that you can make it more simple than it looks.”
Trumm explains that while there might be something like 10,000 SKUs for
the dressings alone, VGM Wound Care guides DME pharmacies and provid- ers through a step-by-step process to research the right dressings for their market and patients.
“So, yes, there are 10,000 SKUs out there for dressings, but what we teach them how to streamline, just focusing on roughly 10, 12 of them,” she says. “It’s a guided hand-holding process that we take them through.”
When it comes to profitability, Trumm says VGM Wound Care provides a wound care calculator on its portal that, while not a profitability calculator, does help them start to paint a financial picture for a potential wound care practice.
“They can actually visually see what the reimbursement, what the gross profit is going to be, and what the gross mar- gins are going to be,” she says. “So they can use that to answer those questions right away.”
For people who might not neces- sarily have access to that calculator, the numbers side of wound care can start to paint a much more attractive picture than they might have initially had in mind. For instance, in the dressing market, Trumm says the gross margins can be anywhere from 15 percent to 25 percent (ish), which are pretty solid figures. Suffice it to
say, there’s a viable business model for simple dressings and other reimbursable wound care products.
Another point of pushback on wound care is documentation because provid- ers and pharmacies believe would care entails a high level of claims documenta- tion.
“Some of the people I talk to will say,
‘Oh my gosh, there’s so much documen- tation,’” she says. “But if they if they’re already doing rehab, or they’re doing therapeutic support services, it’s no dif- ferent; it’s just as much documentation. So I would say, when you really look at it, there isn’t any more documentation than some of the other categories that you deal with for DME.”
THE RIGHT RESOURCES
One last point of pushback about wound care is the nature of the care itself: tak- ing care of wounds can be kind of, well, intimidating because we’re talking about wounds. However, Trumm says that even that trepidation is misplaced.
“They don’t have to physically touch the patient,” she says, adding that VGM Wound care offers education that helps them understand how to work with patients and referrals to provide the right items and instruction. “We help them understand it so that it’s not so scary.”
And a way that VGM wound care does that is through a partnership with Healiant Wound Solutions, which offers educa- tional programs designed to empower clinicians and commercial associates. Healiant provides certification for the non- clinician and the clinician as well. The non- clinician certification program is called the Advanced Wound Product Specialist (AWPS), and together VGM and Healiant offer a virtual, on-demand education program designed to train non-clinicians. The course cover’s the same material that certified wound care clinicians are trained in.
“They provide kind of a Wound Care Boot Camp,” Trumm says, so that DME
“Wound care is underserved. And I believe it’s underserved because — and I hear this from a lot of people — there’s a lot of product SKUs. ... What they don’t understand is that you can make it more simple than it looks.”
— Heather Trumm BSN, RN, CWON, VGM Wound Care
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